What face should you make on your YouTube Thumbail?

Like, does changing your facial expression impact your viewcount?

Heck yeah it does. 

Kapwing used an automated facial coding tool to see which facial expression (happy, afraid, surprised, disgusted, etc.) on the thumbnail got the highest view counts on YouTube. They checked hundreds of the most-viewed videos for the top 10 ‘Tubers in each of 10 categories (music, comedy, science, etc.).

Overall, HAPPY was on the most top-viewed videos.

Then came calm & surprised, both of which also had a lot of variance. F’rinstance, fitness & education ‘Tubers had lots of calm-faced thumbnails on their most-watched videos. Gaming & comedy ‘Tubers (can you tell this is my new favorite word?) had lots of surprised faces on most-viewed thumbnails. (Whaaa???? I’m shocked. Shocked!)

Disgusted was the least-common face on the thumbnails. Which, frankly, disgusts me.

Caveats of course: the sample is all survivors (the most-viewed videos by the top ‘Tubers), so we don’t know what the face frequencies are of the least-viewed videos or ‘Tubers. And it’s not an experiment, so we shouldn’t infer causation from correlation.

Some lessons:

🍊 When in doubt, use a happy face on your YT vid thumbnail.

🍊 Do some experiments! Mr. Beast did A/B tests between surprised & happy that led him to go back & close his mouth on every. single. video. thumbnail. 

🍊Don’t jump to conclusions about causality from this. Remember: everyone who confuses correlation with causation eventually dies.